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Lent 1
26/2/2023

Genesis 2:15-17; 3:1-7
Psalm 32
Matthew 4:1-11

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In a sentence:
The one temptation in life is to fear death in all its guises; in Jesus we see the freedom of denying death this power over us

Our readings this morning are part of a tale with two beginnings.

Adam and Eve and their apple, and the temptation of Jesus, are arguably the first things which ‘happen’ in each of the Old and New Testaments. And there is a clear correspondence between them – Eve in the Garden, conversing with the serpent and Jesus in the wilderness being challenged by the devil. The stories are strongly mythical but no less engaging for that, and part of that engagement is the similarities and differences between them. Perhaps the most apparent difference is that if the First Couple and Jesus undergo the same testing, Jesus comes out looking somewhat better than the other two!

What are we to make of that difference? A moral reading sees something heroic in Jesus’ achievement. He reveals himself to be strong enough to resist temptation where Eve and Adam were not. For their failure, they are excluded from the Garden and die. And yet this is pretty much what happens to the good Jesus, despite his success. This means that if we read these temptations as moral testing, Jesus’ experience contradicts any notion that moral success makes us safe: goodness doesn’t preserve us.

Experience might already have taught us this, but the success of Jesus in resisting the temptations presents a problem with morality, in view of how he dies. This is the problem of theodicy. Theodicy asks about the justice of God: how can God be just if good people like Jesus suffer and die as he did? In the particular case of Jesus, tradition has found an answer which is deep in the Christian psyche: Jesus came in order to die. With this twist, the death of Jesus is no longer an affront to the justice of God but is, instead, God’s own act: God ‘sends’ the Son, a ‘ransom’ for many. This is usually understood in terms of a sacrificial economy: Jesus is a sacrifice which does more than other sacrifices have done. How sacrifice was thought to work in Hebrew tradition is far from clear in the Scriptures, but that tradition is nevertheless used to interpret the death of Jesus, with the typical understanding being that God sacrifices Jesus. On this understanding, Jesus’ triumph over the devil in the temptations proves that he is like an unblemished offering presented at the Temple: perfect, and so a worthy sacrifice to offer against so great a need.

Nonetheless, this kind of sacrificial understanding doesn’t really work for us. Our occasional modern talk of sacrifice – the mother who sacrifices herself to save a child, or the sacrifices of soldiers in war – don’t touch upon the same thing. For sacrifice adequately to explain for us how the death of one good person saves many un-good ones, we would have to come to faith in the old sacrificial system before we could believe in Jesus. For us today, this would be like taking sides against Paul in the circumcision debates (Galatians 2) – become a circumcised Jew first, and then Christ will be a benefit to you. Apart from that, we might also wonder why, if God is truly all-powerful, he cannot simply forgive, without killing Jesus. Theories about God’s utter holiness and the magical saving effect of blood to break through holiness into forgiveness can’t make this question go away.

Jesus’ achievement in the face of these temptations is undeniably a sign of his being and character. But we must also see that, in view of the cross, if he is a new beginning, even this demonstrated righteousness does not avert the cursed life and death to which Adam and Eve are consigned. This new beginning to the tale of God and the world does not quite undo the old beginning. So far as we can see, the deathly effects of the First Couple’s apple-munching continue, even in the person of Jesus, said to be the “Son of God” (‘If  you are the Son of God…” the devil mocks). Our heartfelt ‘What did I do to deserve this?’ misunderstands the human condition: goodness is not salvation from this life. Goodness and innocence do not insure against suffering. This dismal conclusion is what sacrificial theories of Jesus’ death try to avoid but, for the reasons we’ve already considered, these theories don’t get us over the line these days, if they ever did.

We need another way of thinking about the ministry of Jesus from the temptations to the cross. So let’s try this: the ‘fact’ that even this righteous one dies is a call to us to be reconciled to death. This brings both the first and second beginnings of this tale into the very centre of who we are, what we do, and what we expect to come – here and now. Given how the story is told, we cannot but conclude that Jesus – at least – was reconciled to death. This doesn’t mean he was happy about it; ‘take this cup away from me…’, he prays in Gethsemane. But it does mean that death did not get in the way of him living the life-in-all-its-fullness of a child of God. Death did not force Jesus’ hand. In the first beginning of this complex tale, Adam and Eve desire to ‘be like God’. The distinction between them and God is, in the story, cast as the difference between a God who knows Good and Evil and the human beings who do not but desire to. But this is also the difference between a God who doesn’t die and human beings who do. To be ‘like God’ is not to die, not to be a creature. Unlike Jesus, these two ‘grasped’ at being ‘like God’ (Philippians 2), and yet they die nonetheless.

Yet their death – and ours in the same way – is a corruption of death. No longer is death merely part of what they are as not-God creatures. Death is now something to be feared – a power to be avoided or wielded. In the scene which follows what we’ve heard today, they hide from God for fear of judgement (for they are naked and judge this in themselves). This kind of fear of God, and the pain death will now become, are two sides of the same coin.

It’s within this reality that the second beginning of the story takes place: death has become a power to which people are subject, an horizon we know is there and work constantly act to keep away from. Fear of death and its many friends overshadows life, dividing and separating what God had joined together. Fear of death motivates invading armies and counter-offensives, causes us to lash out at each other after a hard day, and makes us greedy. Fear of death causes righteous people to crucify a righteous man.

In contrast, Jesus’ responses to the devil show that he doesn’t fear dying of hunger or the ‘death’ of failing in his ministry. Rather, he continues to live the life of a child of God. His path to the cross is no suicidal relishing of death, but simply the refusal to seek immunity to death. Jesus refuses to allow death to be a motivation. The life of a child of God is freedom not to be God, and a reconciliation to this as freedom:  creatureliness means that we are not immune to death.

Someone once said that the Jesus who calls us bids us ‘come and die’. This death is not suicide; it is a kind of ‘death to death’. In its own strange way, of course, death frees us from from all ties; this is what we mean when we say, ‘Rest in Peace’. But before this, in the life we are still living, to die ‘to’ death is to be set free from the tie of death, from the fear of it, from the willinginess to inflict it on others.

On this reading, the crucifixion is not the failure of goodness to bring us the reward of life. The crucifixion is Jesus’ refusal to fear death, and so is his refusal to be motivated by it. On this reading, the crucifixion is not Jesus passively sacrificed like a coin spent in some economy of salvation. The crucifixion is the triumph of a human being living in the shadow of everyone else’s fear of death. He dies because he does not fear death. The cross is Jesus’ own death-to-death throughout the whole of his life, demonstrated in a ‘real’ death.

In the same way, Jesus’ response to the temptations is a choice for life in the midst of invitations to fear death. This new beginning contradicts the first beginning, in which avoiding death by becoming like God seemed such a good idea.

To hear this tale with two beginnings opens up the possibility of a third beginning – indeed as many third beginnings as there are people who fear death in all its guises, whether the death which is the cessation of our breathing or the death which is some other constraint on life.

The ‘No’ of Jesus in the temptations is a reconciliation to the reality of death but a choice nevertheless to say ‘Yes’ to a life of free and open humanity. It is No to the shadow of death and a Yes to the light of life. It is a No to isolation and a Yes to mutuality. It is a No to hard justice and a Yes healing grace. It is a No to the gaslighting ‘if you are a Child of God’ and simple, source-of-all-life reception of God’s Child-making embrace in all hardship and all joy.

Jesus’ No to the devil’s life-sapping temptations is a No to fear and a Yes to the life God has given us to live.

We are Adam and Eve in the Garden, and Jesus in the wilderness, tempted to say Yes to fear.

But, faced with the choice, let us – in Jesus – say Yes to God, Yes to life.

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Transfiguration
19/2/2023

2 Peter 1:16-21
Psalm 99
Matthew 17:1-9

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In a sentence:
The Transfiguration of Jesus invites a transforming of our sense for – and living of – the lives we have been given to live

We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ,
the only Son of God,
eternally begotten of the Father,
God from God, Light from Light,
true God from true God,
begotten, not made,
of one Being with the Father;
through him all things were made.

(Nicene Creed)

This is rather a mouthful, and a contested one. We don’t recite the Creed each week but we do often enough; and when we don’t say it, it is nevertheless implied in the alternative affirmations of faith, and in other parts of the liturgy.

Where a protest is raised – in the world and often enough in the church – the objection is usually that the confession makes the world too big and God too small. Is God so small as to be identified with Jesus in this way? The objection is not new, which is why the middle bit of this ancient confession of faith is the longest: it’s here that God and the world collide. We have the Creed because of this apparent smallness of God in Christian confession.

Something of this tension between God and the world is reflected in the account of the Transfiguration we’ve heard this morning. By itself, the Transfiguration is not easily accessible. What happens here, why Elijah and Moses are there, why it occurs at this point, its fleeting strangeness – all of this compounds the sense of our distance from the reported experience. Are we simply to ‘believe’ the text and assert that Jesus did glow-up like this for a moment, with heavenly sound effects to complement the light show? What does it all add to our understanding of God? The disciples themselves had no idea what to make of what happened. A hint is given that Easter will make sense of it all, but this doesn’t help if we continue to wrestle to make sense of Easter itself.

Most of you have heard dozens of sermons on the Transfiguration, the last 19 of which here at MtE you can find on our website. I’ll try not to repeat all that this morning! Today we’ll come at it this way: taking as given some mystical experience, let’s consider the divine voice which offers commentary. The voice declares that Jesus is the Son – God’s special one – and that we should take notice of him. What would it mean to say that small and ordinary Jesus is such a presence of the fullness of God?

The first thing we would have to say is that, if Jesus were this presence, we wouldn’t be able to tell by looking at him at any other time. Peter, James and John get a glimpse of something new, but once they get talking they might wonder whether it wasn’t just a dream interrupted by lightning and thunder. Most of the rest of the time, Jesus is just a chap amid a group of men and women, milling about the place, as probably happened from time to time in those days. Perhaps Jesus is wise, and charismatic, and courageous, and committed to his cause, but that describes anyone with their wits about them. Jesus doesn’t look special.

We are told that the disciples’ response at the time was ‘fear’ or, as the Greek word could also be translated, ‘amazement’. This makes sense in terms of the shock at what happens, as a sudden flash of light makes us blink, or a loud noise makes us jump. Yet we are told the story not to know their response but to share it. What if this were true? If Jesus intersects with God in this way, what then for us?

To grasp the extent of this question – the moral extent, we might say, but also what it might mean for our sense of everything – we must keep in mind that it is not merely ‘a’ connection of Jesus to God which flashes forth for a moment. It is the connection of the crucified Jesus to God. The crucifixion (as an event) is still just a possible future at this point of the story, but for the Gospel writer and we who think about Transfiguration on this side of Easter, Jesus is the crucified, discarded one. Listen, the voice from heaven now commands, to the one you abandoned and crucified. This one is my Son, my beloved and my delight. And not so much listen to his ‘words’ – to this or that saying. Listen rather to the Word he is as the collision of the depths of human experience with the whole of God. The Transfiguration is light shining through the cross; (it does not ‘look’ like the resurrection of Jesus but is the meaning of the resurrection itself).

This, then, is not a warm-and-fuzzy, nearer-my-God-to-thee mountaintop experience. Not merely Jesus is transfigured. If it is the crucified Jesus – the sign of the most distant from God parts of the world – if it is this one who is transfigured – then even those things in the world which seem far from God are now pulsing with the possibility of bearing God. The world is now not as we have known it. And not only the world but God also is transfigured. God is shown to be willing to ‘own’, to live into, to die with and to pass through the darkest of human experiences, in the cross.

The Transfiguration, if it happened, says what doctrines of incarnation and atonement and resurrection and consummation would say if they were true: God is the mystery of the world, the hidden beginning, means and end of all that we are. We forget this in the midst of doctor’s appointments and overseas trips, between the birth of grandchildren and reports of wars in faraway places. We forget it when we’re angry that some justice has not been done, and when we’re glad to have received a windfall. We forget, when someone is trying to scam us on the telephone, and when we catch a hint of jasmine on the breeze. To forget God is not to be irreligious but to mistake some part of the world for less than it is – as just a thing which happens. For what it truly is is the possibility of the free and freeing presence of God, making possible the enjoyment – and the suffering – of all that we are and have and can be, without turning those things into God. To say that the big God is met in the small Jesus is to say not merely that this God can be found, but that God wills to be found, in all the small (and big) better-and-worse things of our life.

Jesus is God from God, light from light, true God from true God, begotten not made… in order that we might be, too – here and now in our little part of everything.

If we wanted to say why Christians gather like this today, we might say that we gather to be reminded that we have forgotten. We have forgotten that God is the God of small things, even the God of crucified things. We have forgotten, and so we have feared, and we have lashed out, and we have pushed away because we have thought we can’t afford to love or forgive or hope. We have forgotten what life and the world can be. The Transfiguration is not a thing which just ‘happened’. It is a thing which can happen – the discovery of God which transforms the world around us: Here. Now. You. Me. In God.

‘…a bright cloud overshadowed them, and from the cloud a voice said, “This is my Son, the Beloved and my delight. Listen. Comprehend. Believe. Live.”’

‘When the disciples heard this, they fell to the ground and were overcome by amazement.’

What else could they do with such news ringing in their ears? Now everything would have to change…

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Epiphany 6
12/2/2023

Deuteronomy 30:15-20
Psalm 119:1-8
Matthew 5:21-26

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In a sentence:
What the contemptuous world needs (now, and always), is deadlock-breaking love.

Some of us have been meeting over the last year to consider The Quarterly Essay, as each issue comes out. Last September’s issue was an analysis by Scott Stevens and Waleed Aly of the rise of ‘contempt’ in modern politics. The authors note the intensifying shrillness of ‘cancel culture’ on the left and corresponding antagonism on the right, and the apparent inability to communicate across those lines other than by verbal grenades lobbed out of ideological trenches. The November issue contained substantial correspondence in reply to Stevens and Aly’s arguments, filling out the spectrum of thought about contempt, justice and power in society today.

What has the gospel to say into a culture of contempt?

“You have heard that it was said to those of ancient times,’ [Jesus remarks], ‘You shall not murder’; and ‘whoever murders shall be liable to judgment’. But I say to you that if you are angry with a brother or sister, you will be liable to judgment; and if you insult a brother or sister, you will be liable to the council; and if you say, ‘You fool,’ you will be liable to the hell of fire.

This is, by the way, not quite the gospel – it is the law – but it would seem to have something to do with our present experience of deep antagonism in society and politics. Jesus’ saying comes from the Sermon on the Mount, which both intensifies the received legal tradition of Israel and re-casts it. Here, and in the verses which follow, Jesus presses past a mere external observance of the letter of the law (that internet trolls usually don’t actually kill people they hate) to a problem with the spirit (that internet trolls would be happy if someone else killed the people they hate). And this applies, of course, also to those of us who are not internet trolls but still have a capacity for the kind of anger, hatred and contempt for others Jesus indicates here.

Jesus’ solution to the problem of contempt would seem – at first blush – simply to be, ‘Stop it; don’t do that!’. This is fairly straightforward advice, if not easy to implement. The very fact that Jesus says thinking murderous thoughts is the ‘same’ as murder suggests the likely impossibility of finally obeying this commandment: contempt cannot be expunged.

In Aly and Stevens’ analysis of contempt, and in the various responses to their proposal in the next issue, the assumption is quite the opposite. The question asked is, If this is how our society and politics are working, how do we fix them? (And we must ask this question, of  course!) The question leads into analysis of the nature of democracy and its inherent tensions, and the challenges of balancing rights and responsibilities in human relationships. Not surprisingly, the dualism of the right-responsibility debate means there’s no open-shut case which doesn’t look like an indefensible prioritising of one over the other, and this is all the more obvious from the responses to the Essay. As we might expect, those responses are variously at odds and in agreement with each other and with Stevens and Aly, sometimes quite vigorously and, here and there, with a least a little contempt creeping into the debate about how to moderate contempt in public debate. It’s all pretty cacophonous!

The problem here is that everyone is at least a little bit right, which is to say positively what Jesus has said negatively in our short reading this morning – which is that everyone is at least a little bit wrong. What do we do with that intractability, that inability to pull together in the same direction? The usual approach, and that taken by most of the contributors to The Essay’s discussion, is analysis. A kind of moral calculus is developed from given principles. In this case, background principles include ‘democracy’ and corresponding notions like ‘civility’, with concerns about justice and peace being motivating principles: how can we tweak the system to address injustice and unpeace?

One solution – entertained at the edges in this conversation – is revolution. This isnot a tweaking but an overthrow of the system, expecting the revolutionary violence to be outweighed by the anticipated justice which follows. History has known this experiment. Another solution, often just as violent, is the strong monarchic political hand which doesn’t have to honour democracy but can simply crush the unjust, although it often mistakes the just for the unjust. Because neither of these is an option for contemporary Western societies, attention turns to tweaking: let us better understand ourselves as denizens of democracy, and moderate our behaviour according to a deeper sense of democratic being and, in this way, move towards broader justice and more profound peace.

This is a laudable intention, and we cannot but commit ourselves to such work. Civil and divine law requires this of us. And yet, it will not work. As pessimistic as that is, its justification is pretty much all of history up until a few moments ago. Between the sayings of Jesus and today, there are almost 2000 years. Yet, between what he says and what we say today, there is but the time we require to take an intervening breath. When everyone is a little bit right, and so a little bit wrong, no social or moral calculus will lead us out of the messiness of life together. This is because the condition of being human is not a problem to be solved; it is a mystery to be negotiated. Mysteries are things which are there and can be seen and touched and experienced but can’t be comprehended or managed or directed. If we know that we ought not to hold in contempt, or to lust, or to covet, or to be jealous, we still can’t help but be like this sometimes. We might be able to keep it to ourselves, which helps a little, but this doesn’t make the possibility of murder or adultery or theft go away.

So, what will help here?

Only a miracle.

This is a problem, of course, because we don’t believe in miracles these days – we don’t really believe in them, as much as we long for such rupturings of what we expect to happen next. Part of the problem is that our sense of what a miracle might be is runs along the lines of turning sticks into snakes, walking on water or fast-tracking sick people back to health. These kinds of things, of course, are part of the biblical story, but they distract us.

The miracle which matters, and the miracle which our society and politics desperately needs, is the appearance of the saint. We can scarcely hear even this suggestion without scoffing, not least in the churches if even more loudly in the wider world. But this makes the proposal no less correct. Saints are peace-oriented, justice-creating rule-breakers. They are not ‘holy’ in the sense that they never think contemptuous, salacious or envious thoughts. But neither is the possibility of acting for a peacing justice limited by those failings. Saints are those who simply choose to ‘do justice and love mercy’ with all the humility and grace they can muster. And they do this despite the circumstances, despite what the system says might be the minimum required or the maximum allowed. Saints, then, are not necessarily civil or polite or democratic. They are truth-tellers and truth-doers.

If ‘saint’ is too hard a word to re-habilitate for modern politics, then perhaps ‘love’ might be admissible. Interestingly, it is the word with which Stevens and Aly conclude their response to their critiques.

‘Is it really too much to suggest’, they ask, ‘that the commitment to see one another as equals, and therefore as equals in a shared project which depends on cooperation, compromise, frankness, remorse, forgiveness, reciprocity and mutual education, requires a devotion for which the only word is love?’

‘Love’ has the advantage of being a more secular word than ‘saint’, although with the disadvantage that we often dilute it to almost vacuity. Aly and Stevens propose a strong, politically engaged sense of love, and imagine that we might have to be such lovers. Yet the political crisis they seek to address is that many (at every point of the political compass) seem deaf to the call. And so the call to love is either pointless – in that it doesn’t move us along – or it is incomplete: the imperative to love also requires the indicative of love, which is that such love will die for love’s sake. That is, we must see the cost of heeding this call to love. Saints – if we persist with this label for such lovers – have a tendency to die for their saintliness. If this death is not a crucifixion or a drive-by shooting, it is at least the ‘aspirational’ death-to-self which is personal sacrifice for the greater good. And because such love involves some kind of death, it is necessarily irrational: it resists balanced analysis and comprehension.

Contempt can only be overcome by lovers prepared to die at some level, and prepared to die not only for a ‘cause’ but, ultimately, for the ones who hold them in contempt – for they ‘know not what they do’. This is what a moral and political calculation cannot propose, although it’s the meaning of Jesus’ own death and the death to death to which all potential saints are called.

And who is called to die this life-enabling death to death? This question bedevils the conversation and the responses to the original Essay. The answer is, Everyone. Not everyone will heed the call, of course, which is the original problem: the resistance of contempt to the command to love. Yet the resistance of others is not our concern now. Our problem is whether we ourselves believe that the death of contempt can be overcome by a life of love.

Can saints make a difference? Can the ‘somethingness’ of love overcome the nothingness of death? This is what is at stake in the church’s talk about resurrection: whether or not life and love will not only overcome and transform death and contempt. Overcoming is easy – revolution and power politics can do this. Transforming is the challenge.

Those great lovers among us – our saints, ‘secular’ and ‘religious’ – are a test, a probing, a proving, of just such a possibility. These saints manifest a love unknown towards a future unknown, and we so desperately need them because the futures we think we know are nothing to look forward to.

Let us, then, pray for peacemakers like this.

And let us pray that more of them might arise.

And, while we wait for that prayer to be answered, let’s do our best to be a little more saintly ourselves.

Because what the world needs now – as ever – is love.